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How it Works (Tutorial)
The clockwork riflebot needs Military 1 researched before the recipe will become available for production at an assembler. The Battle droid, Rocket droid, and Firebot need Military 2 researched, plus the required research for their weapons and armour (all vanilla). The final terminator unit is unlocked with Military 3, but you need to be able to make modular armour and laser turrets before you can build a terminator. The droid counter and settings modules unlock with "electronics" tech, Military 1 unlocks the patrol pole as well.
For the new flying robot units, you need "Combat Robotics" research. This unlocks the Defender, Distractor, and Destroyer type robot combat units. You build and deploy these in the same way as the droids.
Droids only be manufactured in an Assembling Machine. They are deployed in a Droid Assembler. The droid recipes are in the Military tab.
Droids are deployed by building a Droid Assembling Machine (Droid Assembler ) and inserting the Droid (Undeployed) item into it, for whatever type of droid you wanted to deploy. The mod script will scan each Droid Assembler's output inventory for a "Deployed" version of a droid and will cause the appropriate droid to spawn nearby the Droid Assembler, in the direction that it is facing (see pipe arrows). You can also deploy droids simply by having the items in your hand and clicking to place like any other object/item. This means you can keep a pocket-army with you for tight situations.
In addition to automatically deploying droids from Droid Assemblers to attack nearby biters, you can build Droid Guard Stations and put droid items in for deployment, the same as with the Droid Assemblers. The guard stations allow you to have a group of droids (10, currently) defend their nearby area (they will not go hunting). The guard station will not spawn any more droids if it counts more than 10 within 16 tile radius. See more info about this feature here
When a droid spawns, it will look around for the nearest squad to join. Squads are just another nearby droid or group of droids. When enough have grouped up (only happens during spawning, there is currently no dynamic squad-joining after spawning), they will move off to fight the nearest biters/enemies. They will reveal the map as they go along, so you can monitor their progress. If there are no other nearby droids to join, the newly spawned droid will create his own squad and new droids will join this one.
You can configure how many droids need to be in the group before they go off to hunt by adjusting the appropriate value in the mod's config.lua file or as of 0.2.1 you can use the settings module and adjust it in-game (preferred method!). The default I have set in the mod is 10, but there is nothing stopping you from producing many more than this fast enough that before the squad moves out of joining range, you could have 20+ droids in it.
If the squad size is below the size to trigger the hunting behaviour, the squad will wander around in a small area and defend it from biters. At any time you can spawn more droids by hand into the midst of the existing droid squad (you can see the squad circles using F5 and having turned on "unit group info" in the F4 menu), and the newly spawned ones will join that squad and trigger the hunting behaviour if there's enough there. This means you can purposefully deploy under-sized squads by hand as groups of defenders, and let the automated Droid Assemblers deploy your "attacking" units elsewhere for the hunting.
In Factorio 15+ and Robot Army 0.3.0+ you can now use the Squad Selection Tool to select a squad (only one at a time for now) and give them a direct "attack-move" style command at a location you click on. Use left click somewhere close to the middle of the squad to select it - all members will get a green selection glow. Then use shift-left-click to issue the attack-move order. To De-select the squad, left click away from the squad. The green glow will stay there as long as the squad is selected.
You can now use the map (M) to watch your droids fight the biters. Use the scroll wheel to zoom in the map until you can see the droids in a 'camera' style view of the game world, with no sound. From this, you can use your selection tool to select and order squads without ever being near the battle!
A combinator that outputs how many droids are alive, See Droid-Activity-Module. Use the Droid Activity Module to automatically limit how many droids you have deployed. I use the signal it generates to do a simple "population limit" on all my droid assemblers, with an inserter connected by green or red wire to the Droid Activity Module and a simple logic condition like "count < 200". The inserter will insert droids into the Droid Assembler until the number of active droids reaches 200, and then it will stop inserting. Any time a droid dies, and the number goes below 200, it will insert more.
You can have your squads automatically gather nearby alien artifacts by placing down an Army Loot Chest. You can only have one of these loot chests per faction/force/"team", and trying to place more down will fail and print a message. When your force has a loot chest active, squads will pick up artifacts within a certain radius (15 tiles) from the squad's position, and the artifacts will appear immediately in your loot chest.
To help clean up your battlefield or find random lost squads, you can build and place a rally point to trigger all squads on your force (EXCEPT guard squads!) to move-to the position of the rally point. Read more about the rally point here
To see info about the new patrol system see here: patrol poles
Basically you can set up chains of a special power pole type object using green wires to join them, and guard station squads can be made to patrol along the length of the patrol route. Keep in mind this is a "Work in Progress" feature, and there might be pathfinding issues and traffic jams in some cases. Try to spread out the patrol route and have a fairly long gap between posts.
To see info about the new settings module, see here: settings module
To see info about the new firebot, see the available droids page here: available droids
For the new flying robot units, you need "Combat Robotics" research. This unlocks the Defender, Distractor, and Destroyer type robot combat units. You build and deploy these in the same way as the droids. The combat robots are weaker but have strength in numbers. The balancing is such that once you get the next level of robot, there is not too much point in having the weaker ones except as a distraction. These robots fly, and have no collision box so you can stack a lot of them together for high damage. 50-100 of them can be in a small space. One technique might be to combine some of these in squads with droids to add firepower. Another might be to use Settings module and turn squad size up to 100 and deploy large masses of Defender + Distractor robots.
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You can now (as of Factorio 0.15+) use the map view and zoom in until you can see your squad, and use the squad selection tool to select and command them to move just like in an RTS game!
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Do NOT deploy droids in the middle of spaghetti - they are allergic to pasta, and will not have a good time. Please deploy droids in a mostly-clear area, and make sure they have a reasonably large size hole in whatever walls are nearby so they can properly path-find their way out. They WILL get trapped in spaghetti-madness, and it's best to just make "barracks" out on the perimeter walls of your factory where you deploy the droids (for hunting) or set up guard stations (for active defence)
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Your construction bots can and will repair (using repair packs) any nearby Droid soldiers that are damaged. This includes player's personal roboport and construction bots and supply of repair packs.
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If a squad of droids is looking depleted, you can manually place the droid items yourself to spawn more droids, and if you place them close enough they will join that squad. Use F5 to see the squad rings.
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deliver droids items out to far-away bases and build a few Droid Assemblers - squads spawned out there are more likely to go and attack biters nearer to that area, and may intercept/delay biter swarms to help defend your outposts.
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This mod allows you to win a battle of attrition - any new biter bases spawned in the "no mans land" will be targeted first and help squash their ability to grow back after all your hard effort in the battlefield.
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Droids will shoot trees or obstacles that get in the way of their pathing, just like a bitter will damage random buildings if they get between them and their targets.